DUARTE – A summer of electricity outages has sparked a plan from Southern California Edison to install a new circuit in the city by 2010.

Yet another outage – the ninth this year – struck Duarte at 7:10 p.m. Friday night and blacked out homes and businesses belonging to about 2,300 customers. Power was restored by 4 a.m.

The cause of the outage was quickly traced to equipment failure on a particularly problematic circuit, dubbed the Honeywell circuit, which has caused many of the outages this year.

While the long-term plan is to replace the circuit, Edison officials say that won’t happen immediately.

“We realize that there is definitely a big problem with the Honeywell circuit,” said Elisa Clifford, a region manager for Edison. “We will not be replacing the circuit. We will be doing maintenance on it and a lot of repairing.”

Clifford and another Edison representative outlined the utility’s plan to the City Council last week, days before another outage hit. Clifford said that the scope of the project to install a new circuit, which will be called Ambrus, will delay its completion until at least 2010.

“This is a major project. It’s going to require a lot of trenching and excavation,” she said.

Deputy City Manager Karen Herrera said the city is “extremely concerned” about the string of outages this year and that it plans to meet again with Edison representatives.

“We will be, I’m sure, having another follow-up meeting with Edison this week,” Herrera said Monday. “We’re still two years out on a lot of these improvements. I think that will be the source of discussion with Edison – can it wait that long?”

Three circuits feed electrical power to Duarte, and the Honeywell circuit is more than 30 years old. It’s also underground, which makes problems especially difficult to diagnose and fix, Edison officials said.

Najib Jabbour, who runs Cuisine on the Green, a restaurant at Rancho Duarte Golf Course, said he lost 90 percent of his business because of the most recent blackout.

Jabbour estimates he lost $4,000 in revenue Friday. Two previous blackouts this summer cost him about $8,000, he said. On Friday, he was forced to turn away a 45-person baptism party because of the outage and had to cancel every reservation but one, he said.

“Some of the food went bad. Most of the food that we cooked and got ready we couldn’t use,” Jabbour said.

A high school football game between Duarte High and Ayala High was also disrupted by the blackout. The game was called in favor of Ayala at the end of the third quarter when the lights went out.